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Last week, Meta laid off 8,000 employees from its global workforce and transferred another 7,000 to new artificial intelligence roles, kick-starting a process of reshaping its operations as it gets battle-ready to stay ahead of competition in the war for AI dominance.
As it ramps up capital expenditure and plans to spend up to $135 billion on artificial intelligence infrastructure, the layoffs and the restructuring point to the scale of the AI pivot at the social media behemoth. Its founder and the Chief Executive, Mark Zuckerberg, has drafted his man Friday, Andrew Bosworth, to undertake the mammoth exercise with a clear mandate to make Meta an AI-first company, WSJ reported. Andrew Bosworth - or Boz, as most people know him - is Chief Technology Officer at Meta, and Head of Reality Labs, the company's wearables and metaverse organisation. The understanding at the top deck of Meta is clear that the next leg of growth will come from AI, and focus on more high-end chips, data centres and hiring top talent will determine the future of the organisation. Meta is one of the many Silicon Valley tech players that have put AI at the centre stage of their existence. On May 18, Blackstone announced a joint venture with Google to set up a new AI cloud company, with the alternative asset manager pouring in an equity infusion of $5 billion into the company. The new company will offer efficient data centre capacity, operations, and networking, as well as Google Cloud's Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), as a compute-as-a-service offering, Blackstone said. The AI game is fast shifting beyond the chatbots to agentic functions. In fact, agentic AI has completely changed the game for tech players as they vie to gain a bigger share of the pie. That's the next frontier for AI players. Agentic AI is capable of functioning autonomously, performing different functions and doesn't rely on prompts to generate responses. In a new policy, Meta informed employees through an internal memo about a tracking system that will be installed on the company's computers and internal apps to track keystrokes and mouse clicks to help train AI models for performing some of the functions autonomously. Bosworth had informed the employees through a separate memo that the company would accelerate the internal data collection as part of "AI for Work" efforts, now rebranded as Agent Transformation Accelerator (ATA), Reuters had reported. He also told the employees that Meta is moving towards a future where agents primarily do the work, the WSJ report said. "Our role is to direct, review, and help them improve," the report quoted him as saying. Bosworth also spearheaded Zuckerberg's "Metaverse" project on virtual reality. However, despite a lot of attention and funding, it never really shaped up. However, Bosworth continues to enjoy Zuckerberg's confidence and is now focusing entirely on scaling AI at the Facebook and WhatsApp parent to put the company firmly on the AI map. (ANI)
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